Even the skulls are smiling!

A friend from Massachusetts emailed me this morning to tell me about his young daughter.

Ella just turned six and is a darling little girl. As the mother of three sons (no daughters) and the sister to three brothers, I do have an affinity for stories about daughters.

They watched one of the Harry Potter movies the other night and now Ella wrestles with “bad thoughts” as she tries to go to sleep at night.

Her daddy used the age-old “let’s think about something else” trick. He cleverly turned her throughts to their upcoming trip to Holiday World. They’ve not been here before, so they couldn’t rely on memories but instead turned to their imaginations to dream up ideas about what might be here.

One of Ella’s ideas was, “There should be big snowflakes that you swing back and forth on!” She was on the right track, happily drifting toward dreamland.

This all screeched to a halt when she remembered we also have a Halloween section.

Uh-oh.

The Halloween holiday can be scary.

Spooky stuff.

My mom always loved the creepy side of Halloween; she used to take my brothers and me on nightly “Witch Walks” each October. At dusk we’d skulk about our neighborhood, telling ghost stories. We’d dash from lightpost to behind trees to keep the “witch” from catching us. My brothers reveled in the thrill. Scared me half to death. So, I’m with you, Ella!

And to quell your fears a bit, take a look here at HallowSwings, which we added a few years ago.

When our graphic artist and our marketing department were working on the graphic design for this ride, Mrs. Koch brought up an interesting question: “Will the design be scary-scary or friendly-scary? I don’t think we should terrify the smaller children.”

The resulting design makes me laugh every time I walk by HallowSwings …